They Were Defeated by Rose Macaulay
In this book of tragedy and great beauty, Rose Macaulay's only historical novel, she reveals a lifelong passion for the seventeenth century. Here she interweaves the lives of Robert Herrick and other poets with those of a small group of fictional characters, setting them vividly in one of the most turbulent periods in English history. The the great enrichment of the English language Miss Macaulay has chosen an historical subject....She has added something permanent to English letters.--Observer Rose Macaulay was a successful novelist whose works include Potterism and The Towers of Trebizond. Susan Howatch is the author of The Dark Shore and Penmarric.
Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was born in Rugby, England, into a family of eminent scholars and Anglican clerics. The second of seven children, a tomboy who hoped one day to join the Navy, she spent much of her childhood in Varezze, a small Italian seaside town, where she enjoyed considerable independence for an English child of her era. In 1894, her family returned to Britain, and after studying modern history at Somerville College, Oxford, she began a career as a writer and quickly succeeded in supporting herself as a novelist, journalist, and critic. During World War I, she worked as a nurse and as a civil servant in the War Office before assuming a position in the British Propaganda Department. There she met Gerald O'Donovan, a sometime Irish Catholic priest, novelist, and married man, with whom she had a romantic relationship which was to last until his death in 1942. Rose Macaulay was the author of thirty-five books--twenty-three of them novels--and is best remembered for Potterism, a satire of yellow journalism; a biography of Milton; her haunting post-World War II novel, The World My Wilderness; two travel books, They Went to Portugal and Fabled Shore; and her masterpiece, The Towers of Trebizond. A mentor to Elizabeth Bowen and a friend to such luminaries as Ivy Compton-Burnett, Rupert Brooke, E.M. Forster, and Rosamond Lehmann, Macaulay was a well-known figure in London's literary world and a fabled wit. She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire shortly before her death in 1958.
Jan Morris was born in 1926, is Anglo-Welsh, and lives in Wales. She has written some forty books, including the Pax Britannica trilogy about the British Empire, studies of Wales, Spain, Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Trieste, six volumes of collected travel essays, two memoirs, two capricious biographies, and a couple of novels--but she defines her entire oeuvre as disguised autobiography. She is an honorary D.Litt. of the University of Wales and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Jan Morris was born in 1926, is Anglo-Welsh, and lives in Wales. She has written some forty books, including the Pax Britannica trilogy about the British Empire, studies of Wales, Spain, Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Trieste, six volumes of collected travel essays, two memoirs, two capricious biographies, and a couple of novels--but she defines her entire oeuvre as disguised autobiography. She is an honorary D.Litt. of the University of Wales and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780192813169 |
| ISBN 10 | 0192813161 |
| Title | They Were Defeated |
| Author | Rose Macaulay |
| Series | 20th Century Classics |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year published | 1981-10-15 |
| Number of pages | 448 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |